Orange Pi One TorrentBox with WDMyCloud – headless configuration

I have WDMyCloud NAS which stores most of my downloaded media and data, it is good device which has been working just fine for over 3 years. At the moment it is used to store torrents and seed them.

Recently I have gotten my hands on Orange Pi One which is practically Raspberry Pi from China, what can I say, I already own all of Raspberry which were released, sold first one, second one integrated to the Audi A4 B6 and RNS-E, third is attached to the official 7″ screen with RetroPie, and zero is in Pi GRRL Zero…. yes, sometimes I have too much time for this kind of stuff.

Third Pi is a bit overkill for torrentbox, zero would require Ethernet adapter (not a big deal, have it, but for some reason under heavy network load Zero just throws Kernel Panic), but this this Orange Pi One has what is needed and has terrible support and updates, so why not dump it as TorrentBox and leave it working.

Here is what I have and what you will need to do this:

NAS drive – In my case it is WDMyCloud

Orange Pi One – with power supply and Ethernet cable for it and microSD card, I have used 8GB Class 10

Computer which can use some ssh client, in this case Putty

That is it, there is no need for HDMI cable or keyboard or mouse for Orange Pi One

Now the specs which matter:

H3 Quad-core Cortex-A7 H.265/HEVC 4K

512MB DDR3 (shared with GPU)

Let’s begin by saying that support for Orange is terrible, last Official images are more than year old, this is first and last device I am going purchasing from them. I am going to use ArmBian operating system which is custom system which is still being updated. Go to the link and download Jessie Server.

Use SD Card Formatter to clear SD Card. Then extract archive you download from ArmBian, use Win32 Disk Imager to write the .raw file, you will need to select to show all files in that tool. Once that is done plug everything up.

Give it around 5 minutes to complete first boot which will end with reboot. Check your router and identify what IP address Orange Pi One received.

Default login information is provided bellow, you will be asked to change it after logging in.

UserName: root
Password: 1234

Set it how you want and create new user account, make sure you remember it, for sake of simplicity I have created user account with same information as my NAS device login information. Once that is done we should update everything to the latest version. Type:sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install cifs-utils smbclient
sudo reboot

All the standard stuff is done, now we need to configure all of this for our purpose.

Let’s begin with mounting NAS shared folders to the Orange Pi One. Type command bellow to open editor, fill in the information with username you use to access your NAS, domain, at-least in Windows environment most of the times is WORKGROUP.

sudo nano /etc/.credentials

username=orange
password=YourPassword
domain=WORKGROUP

Click CTRL+X then Y

Now type other command and add information to the end of the file(192.168.0.106 is IP of my NAS, it is static IP):

While in home directory, create folders which you inputted in fstab file:

mkdir wdmycloud
cd wdmycloud
mkdir Media
mkdir Orange

Now type:

sudo reboot

Wait until system boots and reconnect to it via Putty, re-login, now use commands cd to navigate to the folders which you created:cd wdmycloud
cd Media
ls

If NAS folder has any content on mounted folder you should see list of them:

Part of Orange Pi One automatically connect to the NAS and mounting the shared folders is done. Now we need to configure Torrents part, mainly access to it from other computers.

sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon

Now we need to make few changes in the configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

Here is what I have changed. We are not going to store any downloads or incomplete download to SD card as it is just 8GB so make sure you change at-least all what is listed bellow, if not you might end up of free space in SD card:

And that should be all, now use command bellow to start Torrent daemon:

sudo service transmission-daemon start

Open your browser and visit IP of your Orange Pi One via 9091 port, in my case, you will need login information which you configured:
Have no information yet how well it will perform, but download was jumping from 1.5 MB to up to 5.5MB, which is not bad for such small device.